How to catch a cloud

June 3, 2015 Off By David

Grazed from Nature.com. Author: Nadia Drake.

In February, computer scientist Mark Howison was preparing to analyse RNA extracted from two dozen siphonophores — marine animals closely related to jellyfish and coral. But the local high-performance computer at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was not back up to full reliability after maintenance. So Howison fired up Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and bid on a few ‘spot instances’ — vacant computing capacity that Amazon offers to bidders at a discounted price. After about two hours of fiddling, he had configured a virtual machine to run his software, and had uploaded the siphonophore sequences. Fourteen hours and US$61 later, the analysis was done.

Researchers such as Howison are increasingly renting computing resources over the Internet from commercial providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft — and not just for emergency backup. As noted in a 2013 report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia, the cloud provides labs with access to computing capabilities that they might not otherwise have (see go.nature.com/mxh4xy)…

Scientists who need bursts of computing power — such as seismologists combing through data from sensors after an earthquake or astronomers processing observations from space telescopes — can rent extra capacity as needed, instead of paying for permanent hardware…

Read more from the source @ http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-catch-a-cloud-1.17672